“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.But if your eyes are unhealthy your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (matt. 6.22,23. NIV) https://biblehub.com/niv/matthew/6.htm

With Jessica’s eyes worsening, her corneal graft having failed, these verses came to me in the language Jesus spoke – you are familiar with the joke?

I pondered the concept that if one’s eyes are healthy they enable us to be light filled, enlightened, yet if they are unhealthy then the light within us is darkness, then how great is that darkness.

They undestood the analogy perfectly well, hence believed that the man was blind because of his sin’s or his fathers”. That his blindness was in some way his fault, because sin is inherited – O no! Not another take on original sin.

Jesus tells us ‘not so’. But I contemplate the state of anyone with unhealthy eyes, that, is their Light Darkness? Literally speaking the answer has to be yes according to Matthew and no because of Jesus.

Of course I have fallen into error because our spiritual state does not depend upon the soundness of our body but upon our relationship with God. Jesus made the analogy based on how the people of the day understood the relationship between enlightenment, purity and all other virtues as applicable to healthy or unhealthy vision.

It is my Jessica’s vision that has always been her saving grace and as kept her in the loop because she uses 100% of the little she has while we use comparatively little of the much we have. So that a little tunnel,a glimer will produce in her body a flood of light that the light within her overcomes the darkness.

She is frustrated at the moment and curses her eyesight for letting her down, our home is full of night lights so that she can be in the light even in the darkness. Perfect Light casts out fear.

Yet it is me whose light is imperfect, whose good eyes are dim with sorrow and fear, whose inner life quails at the thought of losing her.

How afraid is she, and that I fear to ask because I know not whether I have it within me to cope. The words in my mind seem like mere platitudes, losing the eyes of the body seems fearful, and what will that do to the light within?

In Christ will all things made alive, whether lacking in senses or sense, firm or infirm. It is the Christ within that converts our darkness into light, not the perfect body. Going to the gym will not give us enlightenment – only God can do this.

O Lord, grant me the grace to have no fear, to trust her to your care, to worry not. AND get on with living.

AMEN